What is an Advocate and what is it in context of Developer Relations (DevRel)? After more than twenty years, I have returned to the realm of DevRel: so what has changed and what has remained the same?

My long time fantasy has been to demonstrate an entire CI/CD pipeline with continuous operations of applications to discuss behavior driven operations and testing as monitors.

The call for this happened over and over at DevOpsDays to answer: how does one learn DevOps, practice site reliability engineering, or have a full application lifecycle environment?

So let’s create a minimal viable product BTD scenario of my DevOps Automation system, extend it to prefix Governance and suffix Management, and then drive maturity to illustrate and discuss best practices.

From September 23, 2015 to May 26, 2016, I took hiatus from my personal blog to explore, explain, and write a number of DevOps articles for my employer on the Calm.io blog. Nutanix acquired Calm.io and I am still part of the Nutanix Calm team, but I’m re-posting these articles on my personal blog since the originals are no longer directly accessible. I am also enhancing them to clarify language, add learnings, and append significant developments as postscripts.

The opening of my first Calm.io DevOps article started with:

Let me share what I’ve learned on my journey to DevOps: it is a culturally rendered term and it has a different meaning for everyone.

In that article, I go on to define DevOps and explain the term. Let me share my experience to easily chart the journey of progressive stages to DevOps maturity.

Why do we need DevOps when IT and Operations succeed in their responsibility for security and uptime, using administrative tools to maintain, backup, patch, and restore those systems achieving a “keep the lights on” goal? Because the operations domain must be documented, democratized, and distributed to achieve agility so Operations returns to become a business force multiplier. Let me demonstrate that traditional values for long lived infrastructure and their retroactive justification do not apply when progressing to a DevOps mindset.

This Calm.io blog recap was originally written and posted by me on May 26, 2016 at http://calm.io/2016/05/26/reconciling-configuration-management-and-immutable-infrastructure/, and slightly enhanced on February 18, 2018.

This Calm.io blog recap was originally written and posted by me on May 24, 2016 at http://calm.io/2016/05/24/configuration-management-in-the-devops-world/, and slightly enhanced on February 18, 2018.

This Calm.io blog recap was originally written and posted by me on December 28, 2015 at http://calm.io/2015/12/28/demystifying-continuous-integration-delivery-and-deployment/, and slightly enhanced on February 18, 2018, be sure to see the Postscript for more perspective!

This Calm.io blog recap was originally written and posted by me on November 3, 2015 at http://calm.io/2015/11/03/infrastructure-as-code-and-calm-blueprints/, and slightly enhanced on February 18, 2018.

This Calm.io blog recap was originally written and posted by me on October 20, 2015 at http://calm.io/2015/10/20/why-is-devops-so-hard/, and slightly enhanced on February 27, 2018, be sure to see the Postscript for significant developments!

For a term that is not even six years old, DevOps remains a mysterious pursuit for many software engineering organizations. Let me define DevOps to help you understand and chart your own journey. Hint: it is a cultural term!

This Calm.io blog recap was originally written and posted by me on September 23, 2015 at http://calm.io/2015/09/23/i-dream-of-devops-but-what-is-devops/, and slightly enhanced on February 18, 2018, be sure to see the Postscript for significant developments!

What happens when you find the same macro and micro pattern in your automation diagram? You reinforce your goals to improve code flow and service design on the way to test driven development!

#shipit and #failfast: I want to share and discuss the DevOps Automation Diagram for continuous deployment. Via open source and this blog, we can elevate the state of our software engineering and service design!

Wonderful accomplishments kicked-off my Infrastructure as Code project: one should start with a map of the world before deciding where to focus, but it is even better when you can optimize and render a new map in real-time!

Mark is a DevOps leader with pioneering work on the world’s largest Internet real-time event and web sites across software and hardware operations, technical and field product management, as well as content and marketing disciplines. Mark’s focus is on agile people and software development along with system design and life cycle thinking: he can build, secure, scale, and manage teams, applications, and infrastructure to work together while nurturing their continuous improvement.